If gargoyles could vomit with disgust somebody would be hanging up buckets at Humber College’s Lakeshore campus next week. The college, located in a converted Edwardian psychiatric hospital on the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto, is hosting two eating contests. This is a place of education that trains social service workers and community service workers. Suburban-poverty.com thinks this is wrong in so many ways. There are food banks in every corner of the GTA now and there are people experiencing starvation in the world beyond. What kind of signal does this send to low income students or young women experiencing eating disorders and to the world at large about Humber? Why does the Humber Student Federation think it’s okay to put on this kind of event, supported by student fees? This is just more evidence, written in all caps in a font called Frat Boy Idiot, of just how low the level of mindfulness, social consciousness, and general discussion of poverty and other issues can be. Shame on you Humber if you go ahead with this. A growing number of students object to the eating contests and hopefully they will be heard by management in time to kill them stone dead. Even a gargoyle can figure this one out.

We thought we were reading The Onion without our glasses on late this morning when we came across a stunner of a news item about the newest muppet character …Lily the poor kid. What the hell planet am I on?

Today in Canada is Thanksgiving Day. Jour de l’Action de grâce has been a national holiday since 1957. What better spot on the calendar could we pick to review the second edition of Poverty In Canada: Implications for Health & Quality of Life by York University professor Dennis Raphael?

From first encounter this work comes across well. The second edition clears 500 pages in trade paperback form and continues the fact-jammed academic dissection of poverty in the first edition, with extras. Of course, there are tables and charts and analysis with references, index and suggestions for web resources and further reading all in the right places. Plentiful ammunition for journalists, academics, policy makers and public servants to use against ignorance of poverty and hopefully poverty itself. Students should find this book useful in many fields.

Poverty in Canada is too frequent, too consistent, too often racialized, too hard on too many children, too deep, too little studied, too (literally) sickening, too often not acknowledged at all, too often blamed on the individual affected by it, too closely linked to deliberately chosen neo-conservative economic policies, and too readily reduced or eliminated by quite reasonable efforts and means. Again and again in this book Canada is seen to fare better than the United States but significantly worse than the Scandinavian countries when it comes to poverty. Considering the size and economic output of this country our poverty has to be some of the craziest shit in the developed world. If you are remotely interested in this topic you will find something of disturbing value in Raphael’s work.

Lived experience of poverty has been given more profile in the new edition. This is sensible. Elaborating the real thing is humane and complements the statistical approach.

Curiously, there is no specific mention of suburban poverty. When we purchased Poverty In Canada we expected to find some direct mention of the phenomenon since the Brookings Institution has done a lot to make it a mainstream issue south of the border. Additionally, we can claim to have directly observed suburban poverty in Canada through social service sector study and volunteering and through living in the suburbs. In its own modest, amateur way this blog has begun to register and aggregate information about Canadian suburban poverty so we are surprised that a big gun academic like Raphael approaches it indirectly, hasn’t chosen to name it. Some of this may have to do with the domestic statistical sources he uses and with the fact that the definitions of suburban and urban remains somewhat vague at times for many of us.

Ultimately, all poverty is a disaster and the labels attached to it are less important than the realities of it. Nonetheless, the experience of poverty changes over time and suburbs are a new frontier of problematic social conditions in Canada.

Seriously, buy and read this book. Mail a copy to your political representative. Put it on your students’ reading lists if you are a teacher. It’s available online and through most book stores.

The National Film Board of Canada came up with a documentary recently about an aging suburb in the northeast corner of Toronto called Flemingdon Park. It’s an honest piece of work directly engaging the people and place. Now, Flemingdon Park is not exactly south central Los Angeles but it sure ain’t film festival Toronto either. Rarely does this flopped Utopia ever make it into the mass media in the GTA unless some young man has just gotten murdered in a housing project. Lack of transit and poor socioeconomic conditions are combined with a lacklustre aesthetic environment that you would imagine from the outside all but destroys meaningful human experience or connection to place. The people of Flemingdon Park may be an archetype of life in many North American suburbs because of the former but they might surprise viewers a little on the latter.

I was driving through Philly the other day and …blah, blah, blah, …poor people.

We thought it good form to find some content from the interwebs that contradicted our own take on the issue at hand lest we be judged smug, dismissive. A semi-anonymous blog post from this summer fits the bill nicely and is linked to below. It employs the relativity argument. Not derived from Einstein’s view of the universe this is a technique beloved of those politically to the right. A cross-comparison to global poverty is usually involved. It is designed to shut down arguments about social policy in a developed country and is, in our experience, driven by fear, loathing and the lack of experience of life though it is usually presented as highly rational and objective. Such positions on social matters remind us that the battle against poverty need be waged as much in middle and upper class brains as in government offices, clothing banks, soup kitchens and shelters.Suburban poverty?The Burning Platform

Johnson County, in northeastern Kansas, is among the jurisdictions starting to encounter suburban poverty. Enough of it to see to the production of this 38 page presentation on the matter this spring.Poverty: at home in the suburbsUnited Community Services of Johnson County

More 2010 US census analysis is trickling into the mainstream media. The stats show Texas, Florida and California really taking the cake when it comes to suburban poverty.
…or maybe that should be a carton of stale Twinkies from the food bank. Poverty pervades the suburbsCNN Money with map & video

Well, he’d go mental on it if his track record of public statements is anything to go by. Apparently the Bible mentions suburbs. That’s one of the things we learned from the item linked below. You can make it your go to reference for the Christian perspective on suburban poverty.Linda Bergquist on the new suburban poorchurchleaders.com